Sunset
by Lady Hate
Summary: Hinata's teammates are not dead. The men who killed them are not hot on her heels. This is not a trap and everything will be all right.


**Sunset**

**A/N**: OOC!Hinata. Why yes I am a hypocrite.

This was written for Lecos's _Use Your Terrain!_ challenge. Thanks a lot to Lecos, Hadz, and Nemrut for their help.

**Disclaimer**: Naruto is not mine.

XXX

The man lay sprawled in a ditch. All his limbs appeared unmoving except for the slight twitching of his left hand, struggling to cover the blood from the dark stain on his thigh. His breathing was erratic and shallow; each heaving movement of his chest looked painful if only for the wince on his face and the kunai buried just to the right of his lungs. His pouch was open, his clothes torn at the sleeves and wet where his blood flowed freely and where the small stream lapped against his body. From the description, it was pretty much what they expected.

Now to get him back before the late afternoon sun set and they lost what little they had of the warm bright sunlight.

As the body wasn't going to help itself up, Kiba skipped forward.

XXX

Hinata quivers in dread and pain and exhaustion, observing the men on the peripheral of her Byakugan vision. If she just does this right, she will come out okay, she knows. Because her teammates are not dead; Kiba is not dead, Shino is not dead, Kurenai-sensei is not dead. The men who killed them are not hot on her heels and moving towards her right this moment. Bullshit.

_Calm down, Hinata, calm down. Remember your training. Breath slowly. Breath, damnit_.

There.

She sags against a tree for a moment before pushing herself from the ground and limping away from her pursuers.

The sky and the sun glow a brilliant red.

XXX

Kurenai-sensei held out a hand to stop Kiba, who leapt more than walked towards the man – it was, after all, getting a bit late.

"Get in position. Now!" Kurenai-sensei whispered, hands reflexively throwing back to protect her genin. They scrambled into place. Hinata to the left, Kiba the right, and Shino the rear. Their senses strained to decipher the thick of the forest and the labored breathing of the man in the ditch.

Through Hinata's Byakugan, nothing seemed strange about the soon-to-be corpse. But then again she wasn't trained to notice the slight bulge in his sleeve, the artificial color of the blood, or the odd angle with which the kunai was wedged into his chest.

It was pretty obvious, however, when he stood up with a twisted smile on his face that if Hinata wasn't mistaken looked almost a bit ashamed.

"Not bad," the man said. There was no chakra about him – no ninjutsu or genjutsu to mask his appearance. He looked exactly like the picture of the wounded ninja they were sent out to retrieve, scar and birthmark and blue eyes and square jaw and smile and all. Traitor.

"Shit," said Kiba, who probably couldn't keep his eyes to the right again.

"Be careful," Kurenai-sensei whispered as she lunged forward.

XXX

It was a very strange day. Were it was any other Monday morning, she would be training – which is a nice euphemism she thinks – with her father right now. Instead, they sat in the dojo having tea. There was no council, no Neji and no Hanabi, just Hinata and her father and the ominous air like the sky when it is about to rain.

On good days, she would remember the slight softening of her father's eyes, except she isn't sure she feels charitable right now.

XXX

The traitor-nin only had time to draw out a scroll before huge spinning shuriken flew at him from all directions. Two of them severed his outstretched arms with a crunch, and if he wasn't mistaken a shuriken prong just buried itself deep into his back. His knees gave out. The earth beneath him trembled, and two hands shot out of the muddy water to strangle him. He would have clutched at his neck if he had any arms left. Instead, he writhed from the indescribable pain exploding from his shoulders and from his back and from the cutting of air from his throat. No one said a spy-traitor had to be a good fighter. Nevertheless, the pain disappeared and his vision cleared as a surge of chakra disrupted the illusion.

"Watch out!" Hinata said. She could have warned her sensei a split second earlier about the chakra glowing from the scroll the traitor-nin dropped, but it wouldn't have mattered anyways. Eight human figures appeared out of the smoke from the summoning seal. Kurenai-sensei stopped just in time and jumped backwards, shielding her students.

"Shit," articulated Kiba.

XXX

Hinata is not sure why she remembers that day with her father, except in the back of her mind she had already figured it out ever since those Kumo nin appeared from the scroll. Instead, she keeps looking for the place she saw when they set out to recover their wounded "comrade". It should be right about here, the tunnel with the metal door. Ah. There it is. High atop that small hill to her left. A bit higher than she prefers, but she trudges upwards anyways.

Activating her Byakugan for a brief moment again, she sees the men gaining fast on her trail. She has five minutes, tops.

XXX

"Listen carefully," Kurenai-sensei said, "run back to the village. It shouldn't be long before you encounter support units. Send for help the way I told you. Protect Hinata at all costs."

But Hinata couldn't move. Body shivering and twitching but couldn't move. Her sensei's tone left no doubt as to their fate. It was a lie to their enemies. Her team wasn't going to survive. How could they? It was a trap involving turning a Konoha ninja and writing complex summoning scrolls and risking inter-village peace by an ambush right outside the borders. And if she had been trained to notice she would have seen too that those eight ninjas weren't ordinary in the slightest. All planned and timed to deceive a genin tracking team. Hers.

The truth was cold and cruel like the thunder outside her room at night, like the death of her mother one wintry morning, like the eyes of her clansmen… They were going to die. All because of her and because of this cursed bloodline.

And then there was that to worry about.

"Hinata," Shino's voice jolted her, slightly but uncharacteristically panicked, "Let's go. Now!"

"We can't leave sensei here! If we fight it's four 'gainst five!" No one bothered to correct Kiba.

"Please, Kiba-kun. We have to go," Hinata said. Perhaps she had been woken up by Shino. Perhaps her Huyga instincts finally kicked in. Perhaps she just never lacked the courage to do what was necessary to begin with. So even if they were all going to die they had to go. Kurenai-sensei wouldn't have worried specifically about Hinata's safety otherwise.

And they ran.

XXX

She is sure she has less than a minute now, but she no longer has enough chakra for the Byakugan. At least she is here. Her back rests on the cool metal doorway, and she allows herself a second to calm the frantic beating of her heart.

Her hands move to her pouch, careful not to disturb the wound on her ankle she got when a stray kunai missed Kiba who was shielding her, or the shuriken to the right of her ribs that Shino was trying to remove before the poison finally killed him. No, she hasn't even time to mourn yet. She gets out the kunai and notes almost as an afterthought that her hands do not tremble.

Make sure it goes in completely, her father said, in the same matter-of-fact tone he used to tell her that her mother was dead, and showed her the right grip and the right angle. It is your duty as the heir of the Clan, her father said. He didn't say it will hurt, nor did he say they won't have a reason to leave her alive, but those are kind of given.

Still, if he could just have told her to be brave, to not cry, that he loved her and that she would never be alone…

It really is the best place to watch the setting sun, she thinks. She regrets she won't be able to see it in a moment when she stabs her eyes and slits her throat.

XXX

end

**A/N**: Thanks for reading.

Nemrut raised a good point about precedence in recent manga chapters for using DNA, which means that Hinata's corpse would have to be burnt. Fortunately, I am blissfully unaware of the train wreck that canon has become. So, let's just ignore this particular plot hole which is totally not my fault?

Also, Akamaru is sick at home. Thanks Nemrut.


End file.
